Inès Longevial, Perchée: Ketabi Bourdet - 22, Passage Dauphine, 75006 Paris

These self-portraits, dotted with the shadows of branches and foliage, form the core of this exhibition, in a palette that this time seems to favor dawn over sunset. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s The Rampant Baron, a philosophical tale about 12-year-old Cosimo who climbs a tree and ends up spending his life as a man in it, this series continues a meditative state that runs through the artist’s work. A sense of solitude, the need to anchor oneself in the world, questioning the role of the artist in society are embodied in a poetry of gesture, attitude and color that eschews narration.

Marking a return to the vegetal ornamentation characteristic of her early work, these paintings nonetheless delve deeper into an aesthetic of pared-down simplicity that replaced the gaudy world of her early drawings, several years ago. Skin is still the thin membrane between intimacy and the world that imprints its colors on it, but the arborescences that innervate them no longer respond to the pure freedom of drawing: they are its scars, its raw veins. While the milky hues (water green, butter yellow, banana yellow, stormy mauve, brilliant orange) and the use of blur and translucency maintain the soft, vaporous harmony so cherished by the artist, the question of roots and their antagonism is suggested by the ramifications of stems that resemble currents of life, and the solid branches that sometimes serve as support. The choice of tight, off-center framing detailing body parts creates a disorientation that, like the young baron separated from the ground, extracts these evocations from their earthly origins.

For the artist, it’s also a question of expressing a silence that constitutes the act of painting itself and conditions its cathartic dimension: perched in trees, one can abstract oneself from the world in order to better contemplate it, it’s a way of taking a step back from extreme states of being, it’s the challenge of emptiness that is necessary for creation. In fact, Inès Longevial readily refers to Jonas, the artist in Albert Camus’s short story which bears the same title, who chooses to retreat to the symbolic heights of an attic: «It was difficult to paint the world and men and, at the same time, to live with them».

As a counterpoint, the artist presents several works in which the human figure is absent for the first time. Around her self-portraits, small and large vertical panels compile a sort of woodland glossary of butterflies, ants, birds and pine cones, providing material for a dreamlike escape, often translated into a stop-motion image. The exhibition is also an opportunity for Inès Longevial to reveal her preparatory work, which in itself constitutes a culmination. The set of pastels, for example, is much more gestural and spontaneous, reflecting experiments with light, poses and points of view that define the artist’s distinctive approach. This work makes even more tangible the color laboratory that turns each of Inès Longevial’s works into a field of sensations, the emotional impact of which is always the fruit of introspection.

Yielding even more to the virtues of intuition, the artist revives the surrealist tradition of the «cadavre exquis», the exquisite corpse, and the whimsical exploration of her early years in a series of small drawings on paper napkins, made every morning in a café in Spain, during her vacation. The characters, scrawled in ink according to the purest rules of the art (one end after the other, hiding the part that has already been drawn), display a refreshing extravagance, and we enjoy imagining dreams, symbols, stories and childhood memories in the midst of these improbable figures.

Eva Pion